A day at the gymkhana

[veloman]

Arwyn

Sorry,spelt gymkhana wrongly in the heading.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Arwyn,

As you have discovered, the biggest problem with these kind of events is the incredibly busy backgrounds the give!

The two horses with riders are a good size compositionally, but the first in particular has a lot directly behind it cars, sheds, all sorts, which, with your kind of camera, is almost all in focus when it would be much better if softer - this is almost unavoidable, but if you had traded the 1/200s at f7.1 for say, 1/800 at f4.5, it might have been better.

The other good thing about this shot is you have just the one person this side of the fence watching them go by.

It can be quite difficult to find locations where you can isolate the subject more from the background, getting down low is one way, but on a day like this, the sky would blow horribly, so that wasn't an option in your case.

Here's some I took in May last year with a camera like yours, and you can see I had the same problems, plus I didn't know then what I know now , so they are deficient in many other ways too.
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/dhumphries1/Showjumping#

A few months later (July), and thanks to stuff I learnt here, I was taking and PPing with much better results;
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/dhumph...ndShowjumping#

Cheers,